Abstract

This thesis investigates the integration of an embodied conversational agent (ECA) in an historical virtual reality environment, enabling the user to explore the location alongside the agent. It presents a technical solution for a realistic embodiment of a conversational agent and for a fluid conversation with the agent, as well as a method to generate location awareness for this agent. Building on this foundation, a historical learning scenario set in ancient Egypt was developed, allowing users to engage in conversational learning about specific topics of interest while discovering the place.For evaluation, an embodied conversational agent was compared with a non-embodied conversational agent as conversation partner for exploring a historical place in virtual reality in a user study. The ECA offers a more immersive interaction through its physical presence, body language, and non-verbal cues, while the voice-only agent relies solely on auditory communication. It was found that the social presence of the embodied agent was significantly higher than that of the non-embodied agent. This indicates that the embodiment of the agent improves the interaction between the agent and the user through the agents physical presence and its' non-verbal behavior. The embodiment of the agent did not lead to any significant differences in terms of the sense of presence in the virtual world, the intrinsic motivation to explore the environment or the subjective-related learning outcome of the user. Through qualitative analysis of comments of the participants in the user study, recommendations for future developments of ECAs for exploration of virtual historical environments were identified. The results indicate that talking to an agent in the context of exploring historical places in virtual reality can provide an entertaining and educational experience.

Reference

Richter, M. (2024). Embodied Conversational Agent for Urban Exploration of Historical Places in Virtual Reality [Diploma Thesis, Technische Universität Wien]. reposiTUm. https://doi.org/10.34726/hss.2024.123164